After all, Hollywood was making a movie about his father, James Rorimer, who helped rescue looted artworks from the Nazis during World War II as one of the Monuments Men.

Would the new film of the same name, which opened at area theaters on Friday, stretch the facts and portray Louis’ father in a questionable light?

James Rorimer (1905-1966) was a leader in the U.S. Army’s the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives group, formed in 1943 to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis and to return the objects to their rightful owners.

Rorimer went on to become director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1955 until his death, after which the Met appointed the flamboyant and controversial Thomas Hoving as his successor.

Louis Rorimer, born in 1947 in New York, returned to Cleveland to attend law school at Case Western Reserve University and to work at the Jones Day law firm from 1975 until his retirement in 2011.

He now raises cattle on his family’s Snake Hill Farm in Chagrin Falls and in his free time audits art history classes at CWRU, indulging a passion for art related in part to his renewed appreciation for his father’s career.

View full sizePatriarch: Cleveland artist, designer, teacher and pioneer of modernism, Louis Rorimer, in his fifties, in an undated photograph. His son, James became a Monuments Man in World War II and later, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.Ethel Standiford /Courtesy Western Reserve Historical Society

Art also runs deep in the family. Louis’ grandfather, also named Louis Rorimer, (1872-1939) was an important designer of decorative arts and a longtime professor at the Cleveland School of Art, now the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Louis (the younger) and other family members agreed in recent years to share James Rorimer’s wartime correspondence with author Robert Edsel, whose books on the Monuments Men inspired the new movie.

Co-written and directed by George Clooney, the film stars Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett, among other marquee names.

To Louis Rorimer’s relief, the movie stayed within respectable bounds as far as his father is concerned. It portrays James Granger – the Matt Damon character, who was modeled on James Rorimer – as an upstanding art expert with backbone, guts and integrity.

“I really enjoyed it,” Louis said Friday in an interview at his home in Shaker Heights. “I thought it was a huge effort and the cast. Like everybody else, I’m awed by the celebrity cast. They were fabulous.”

The film compresses the vast story of the Monuments Men, a group of scholar-soldiers who numbered over 300, into the story of seven principal characters who for the most part are composites of real, historical figures.

Louis Rorimer said he and family members were worried that the film might suggest that James Rorimer had an adulterous affair in Paris while pursuing his mission.

To Louis’ pleasant surprise – spoiler alert - Matt Damon’s character gently demurs when the French art official and Resistance spy played by Blanchett attempts to seduce him.

“Our family was concerned about the interaction between my father and [the] Cate Blanchett [character]. And I thought that came out really nicely.”

Louis said that during his childhood, his father never made a point of dwelling on the war.

“I don’t think there was any of that reluctance to talk about it,” Louis said. “It’s just that he was so busy being curator and director of the Met. By the time I was old enough to know what it was about, his Army experiences were in the past and almost a separate career.”

Louis also speculated that after his father wrote a book about his wartime experiences, “Survival: The salvage and protection of art in war,” published in 1950, that he felt little need to revisit the past.

Louis did notice, however, that his father enjoyed keeping a pistol around.

“He was one of the few people in New York City who had a pistol permit,” Louis said. “When the guards [at the museum] would go on strike he’d take his sidearm and go over to the museum and stay all night and wait for the strike to be over.”

Somehow, a rumor developed that James Rorimer enjoyed wearing his Army boots at fancy soirees at the museum, but Louis said that wasn’t true.

In the years after the war, and after his father’s death in 1966, Louis said he gave little thought to the Monuments Men and their contributions.

“I was a little bit blasé about the whole thing,” Louis said. “We knew what dad did during the war. It was kind of old news.”

Yet he said his appreciation grew after reading Edsel’s books and as the movie release approached.

He said he also developed a greater appreciation for the work performed by his mother, Katherine, who has a master’s degree in art history.

While her husband was in Europe, Katherine Rorimer worked in a government group studying aerial photographs of European cities to help the military avoid harming sensitive monuments.

In recent weeks, Louis has accumulated a growing pile of magazine and newspaper clippings about the film and the Monuments Men.

He has also taken pleasure in knowing that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted a small exhibition in its Thomas J. Watson Library, on view through March 13, containing wartime photographs of his father, a pocket notebook he carried during his military service, and index cards and photographs he used to document European monuments damaged during the war.

“As the whole thing has unfolded, I’ve really appreciated it more and more, particularly with the movie and the congratulations we’ve received from friends.

“When you see it reflected in the reactions of other people you begin to appreciate the real significance.”

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